Come and Tell Me Some Lies (20 page)

‘Mmm …' I was unenthusiastic, but perked up when Palladia told me I would have a telephone next to my bed.

Mummy became sentimental and kept following me around the house as I packed, offering broken china animals. ‘This was yours when you were five; I think you should take it with you.' When I rejected the limbless pony, she folded her hands and started to recall the labour pains she suffered to bring me into the world all those eighteen years ago.

Snapping and snarling at everyone, I heaped the brown Ford Cortina with all my belongings. Daddy had given me this car as a leaving-home present. I wished it was a sports car and hardly managed to say thank you. Poppy stumbled out of the house wearing a pair of gold-painted stilettos I had thrown at her while clearing my bedroom. ‘You said I could have them, I know you did,' she pleaded, rocking forward as she struggled to keep them on her feet. I couldn't be bothered to argue. Looking at her, I suddenly wanted to change my mind; to unpack the car again and stay at home. I sat down on the grass, pulling Poppy down next to me, and hugged her awkwardly. She was ten, too big to cuddle on my knee, but I remembered her baby embraces, and I wanted them again now.

Brodie and Flook came out, each carrying a slumped cat. ‘We've given them their sleeping-pills. The vet says they'll work
for four hours, so you should get there.' Brodie passed me the soft heap of Angelica, my ginger cat. Flook lifted Witton, the stripy one, into the car, placing him carefully inside a hat where he fitted like coiled rope.

It was time to go. I hugged everyone in turn and, shaking, crawled into the tiny space left by my luggage. Mummy and Daddy, Brodie, Flook, Dan and Poppy stood by the porch waving as I grated the gears and drove away down the drive. I cried all the way to Norwich, but when I jerked into the slow lane of the London road, I became a new person. Super-efficient and grandly independent, I chugged to London, my top speed downhill a stately forty. The cats woke up at Hyde Park Corner and were very alarmed. Climbing on to my shoulders and scrambling along the dashboard, they looked out at the whirling, grinding traffic and miaowed pitifully. I felt ashamed for having brought them.

October 1991

The longer I lived away from Mildney, the more often I returned. Each time I came home, I was reassured by Dad's enthusiastic discussions of fourteenth-century Chinese physics, and his determined battle against Mum's use of the categorical imperative. ‘You are your mother's daughter,' he told me over and over again as I marshalled him on excursions, bossily insisting on his wearing a hat. He complained, astonished, when I refused to let him drive for thirty miles when he was recuperating from pneumonia.

In London during the week, I developed a paranoid dread of the telephone. If it rang very early or very late, I raced to answer it, rehearsing my reaction when I was told Dad had died. I knew my lines inside out. I knew how I would watch over my brothers and my sister and help them. I knew how I would speak to my mother. I knew I could cope. In London, with none of my family about me, I was ready for Dad to die.

In Norfolk, I was guilty and appalled, shocked that I could overreact so when away. There was Dad, joking and teasing, waking Mum up at dawn for a verbal sword fight over Kipling's syntax or whether Hitler invented the VW Beetle.

One weekend he was in hospital. I went to visit him with Mum. I was tired out and feeling ugly. I had impetigo. ‘Impetigo is the twentieth-century descendant of the plague,' Dad announced when I arrived. ‘I have asked Nurse Amalasontha, and she tells me this is so.' I glared at him and whispered to Mum, ‘Is the nurse really called Amalasontha?'

‘Of course not, she's called Joan, but your father is trying to change all their names here. He's persuaded the doctor to call her Amalasontha.'

Nurse Amalasontha bustled in with a cup of tea in her chubby hands. She frisked and flirted with Dad. Her gait changed from the stately glide of a ministering angel and she skittered about like an awkward heifer.

‘They'll let me out of here tomorrow,' whispered Dad when Amalasontha had swerved out again. ‘If they don't, I'll hitch-hike.'

At Mildney, Dan shivered in the playroom. It wasn't cold and he was wearing a jersey. He whispered to me to follow him and he limped into the hall. ‘Jim's in trouble,' he said. ‘The police are after him.'

‘Why? What's he done?' I whispered back. ‘Is it serious?'

‘Very. I can't tell you why, but you should say goodbye to him. He's going to vanish any day now, before they find him, and he won't say where.'

I begged and cajoled, bullied and wheedled, but Dan wouldn't tell me what Jim had done. I tried for clues: ‘Does Dad know what it is?'

‘Yes, but he won't tell you. Honestly, Va Va, it's no joke. It's life and death.'

‘Well, it can't be that bad, or Dad wouldn't be friends with him.'

‘Depends what you think is bad,' said Dan provokingly. I wondered if I should pull his hair and torture it out of him, but he was too big now.

Suddenly, he capitulated. Dan had never been good at hiding things; he always confessed when he broke a window with a cricket ball, or pinched half of Dad's engine for his car.

‘Have you never guessed or wondered where Jim's money comes from?' Excitement broke over his face. I held my breath. Dan pulled me nearer and whispered in my ear, ‘He's a bank robber.'

Danger, danger, glamorous, wonderful, shocking danger bolted through me. ‘He didn't hurt anyone, did he?' I was anxious that the image should be untarnished. Jim, dispenser of good to the poor and needy, must have no blots on his copybook.

‘No. But he did have guns,' said Dan, ‘and he says the police are on to him.'

I was smiling to myself, beguiled by the notion, absurdly ignorant of any reality. ‘Maybe he'll escape.' Unintentionally I began to hum, ‘My daddy was a bank robber. He never hurt nobody', a song by The Clash which Brodie and I had played as teenagers.

‘I don't think so.' Dan was serious. ‘He will if he can disappear soon. But he thinks they are following him now.'

I flew to Italy the next morning to research a documentary about a woman who had once been married to a bank robber.
Serena Montepulchro lived among pink marble columns and white peacocks in a remote Sicilian palazzo where the top-floor rooms lay naked beneath the sky. She talked reluctantly, hiding her few words behind a thick and undoubtedly phoney Italian accent, as I followed with my tape recorder through vines and lilies. I returned to London elated. On my last night at the palazzo, Serena had imbibed half a bottle of Cente Herbe, a poison-green liqueur, and had rolled across her dining-room floor, a crazed dervish in cream lace, lobbing lumps of bread at her guests and singing along to Roy Orbison's ‘Pretty Woman'. The image was unforgettable, and for once I felt like a real professional, with something to say.

There was nobody at my flat when I returned from Italy, and I had no keys. Stripping off the beautiful white cashmere shorts I had bought in Florence to celebrate my successful interview, I climbed over the porch, a kinky cat-burglar in black tights and leotard. The telephone was ringing, and with each peal I scrambled more frantically. Finally I was in, through the bathroom window; I fell inelegantly, my head just missing the lavatory bowl. The phone was still ringing. Out of breath and giggly, I picked it up. It was Flook.

‘Va Va. You're back. Is anyone there?'

‘Nope. Just me and the loo. I got stuck and—'

‘Va Va. I've got some bad news.'

Flook's voice was rigid and tight, so heavy it seemed to fall down the line, shattering my mind. I knew.

‘Dad's dead, isn't he?'

‘Yes, I'm sorry I had to be the one to tell you.' Flook talked
on, giving details which swam round and round, lashing my heart. ‘It was last night at about seven o'clock. He wasn't in pain. He was at home.'

Suddenly cold, my teeth chattered against the phone. I listened. So many times, in so many ways, I had anticipated this. Now all the careful preparation was useless.

It's happened. He's gone now. It's happened. My brain thudded, over and over again. Flook told me to get a taxi to the station. ‘We'll all go home together,' he said.

Like a sleep-walker, I obeyed his patient, simple instructions, collecting sheaves of black clothes, heaping them into a dustbin bag because my case was full from Italy. I called a cab. I was still wearing only tights and a leotard; Flook had not known this, so had neglected to tell me to get dressed. I did not think of it myself.

There followed the slowest days of my life. Minutes spiralled, never turning into hours as we went through the curious, secret rituals which death brings. Dad died on the day the clocks went back, a day he had always hated for its dismal acceptance of winter. And winter arrived, bringing sharp bright days which faded early, the sky red behind shivering black trees denuded by flint-sharp wind.

Pucker's, the undertakers, bustled into action. They laid Dad out in their breeze-block Chapel of Rest; when empty of death it doubled up as an electrician's workshop. Fearful, but unable to stay away, Poppy, Brodie and I went with Mum to see Dad there. Trussed in white satin frills like a babe prepared for christening, he lay in a silk-lined coffin. I kissed his forehead. He was colder
than stone. Brodie cried. Poppy, Mum and I stood dry-eyed, absorbing every detail. I didn't feel he was there. Dad would never wear white frills. He had to be somewhere else, in his fisherman's cap and old suede jacket, laughing at his corpse.

Pucker's telephoned the next morning. They had decided I was in charge, and having asked my name, clung to it.

‘Hello, is that Mrs Gabrielly? Pucker's here. We just wondered if you would like the grave dug double deep?'

‘What for? I don't know anything about graves.'

‘Well, in case you want to pop your Mum in later.' Mrs Pucker's voice was a mixture of brisk practicality and motherly sympathy.

My knees buckled, and I agreed. ‘Oh yes. Whatever you think is best. I don't think I'll ask her now though.' I told Mum later, and she doubled up with laughter.

We, her children, hovered around her, trying anything, everything, to protect her from loss, and knowing we could do nothing.

A friend brought six little brown bottles of Rescue Remedy; they were labelled for each of us. ‘What's the difference between them?' Dan wondered. He took a drop from each. ‘Mum's is neat brandy, Va Va's is water, and mine tastes like Coca-Cola. Who wants to swap?' He was sent outside to gather wood.

Preparing for a funeral is like making party arrangements with a knife in your spine. This, with obituaries and letters from long-ago friends, was like one of Dad's book launches. A hundred times I opened my mouth to say, ‘I must show this to Dad,' only to close it foolishly.

The day before the funeral Jim arrived. Mum had chosen him to be one of the pallbearers, along with the boys and Dominic, who had arrived with Liza. ‘Dan, will you ring him and ask him for me?' she said. ‘Patrick loved him so much, I think he is the right person, don't you?'

‘He may have gone away,' said Dan, but when he phoned, Jim was there. ‘I couldn't go when I heard about Patrick. I wanted to see you lot were all right and to come to his funeral. I am deeply honoured. Tell Eleanor that of course I will be a pallbearer, no matter what.'

Dan relayed the news to Mum, and the rest of us sneaked into the Drinking Room.

‘Mum doesn't know, does she?' Brodie stroked the Chinese dog on the mantelpiece.

Flook shook his head. ‘We'd better not tell her till afterwards, she'll only worry.'

‘Will she be angry?' asked Poppy. ‘It would be awful if she wished she hadn't chosen him.'

‘No. She'll like it. Dad would love it anyway, and he knew,' I said.

Dad's funeral was held on All Souls' Day. A Saturday. The day of the Rugby International Final between England and Australia. Kick-off was at three o'clock. We walked up to the church behind the hearse. Our dog T-Shirt came with us, a purple scarf tied round his hairy throat. The boys and Jim, sombre in long black coats, their eyes downcast in faces where sorrow was carved as deep as Jim's scar, lifted the coffin out of the hearse. The graveyard was full of people.
No one moved or spoke as the boys carried their father to the church.

The service began. When Nile, the dreadlocked Ghanaian singer in Brodie's band, sang ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' in our village church, televisions in pubs and sitting-rooms all over England roared the same words from the lips of a thousand thousand rugger fans.

‘If you get there before I do

Coming for to carry me home

Tell all my friends that I'll be coming soon

Coming for to carry me home.

‘Swing Low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home …'

Twelve squad cars, six motorbikes, three vans and a helicopter were used in the raid on Jim's house. An army of men in bulletproof boiler-suits and black helmets burst in through doors and windows as Jim slept. Outside, a frogman bobbed in the duckpond, slime dripping from his rubber suit. Jim was taken away in handcuffs. The police emptied drawers, slit mattresses and pulled up floorboards. They dug up the lawn and had to re-lay it when Jim's landlord turned up to mend a barn. They rootled through three tons of hay and grain, they dismantled the car and the fridge and the cooker. They did not find what they were looking for. My father would have laughed if he had known.

Raffaella Barker, daughter of the poet George Barker, was born and brought up in the Norfolk countryside. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels,
Come and Tell Me Some Lies, The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, Green Grass, Poppyland, A Perfect Life
and most recently,
From a Distance
. She has also written a novel for young adults,
Phosphorescence
. She is a regular contributor to
Country Life
and the
Sunday Telegraph
and teaches on the Literature and Creative Writing BA at the University of East Anglia and the Guardian UEA Novel Writing Masterclass. Raffaella Barker lives in Cley next the Sea, Norfolk.